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She's having a whale of a time
Anna Paquin won an Oscar at 11. Now she's a star -- and not screwed up at all
Kevin Mayer
The preteen pregnant pause. That's how most people remember Anna Paquin.
There she was, up on stage, 11 years old, the co-star of The Piano,
clutching her Best Supporting Oscar, staring widely, grinning like a
maniac, breathing heavily and saying absolutely nothing. After 20
increasingly comical seconds, with Gene Hackman, having presented
her with the award, hovering uncomfortably in the background, Paquin,
the second youngest Best Supporting Actress (Tatum O'Neal's on the
top spot), quickly says her thank you's and giddily skips off the stage.
Enough already with the Oscar shtick, groans the 23-year-old Paquin
today. "Obviously that whole Oscar thing has allowed me to have
the opportunities that I've had. But you know what? It's not the
only thing I've done."
Which is a modest way of underselling an impeccably navigated
career path that has bounced Paquin from the lens of Franco
Zeffirelli (Jane Eyre) to Spike Lee (The 25th Hour)
via the blockbusting X-Men movies and right into this
month's critically adored multiple-award winning New York dramedy
The Squid and the Whale.
That movie, directed by the rising tyro Noah Baumbach (the writer
of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), is a witty and
biting analysis of a Brooklyn family on the brink of breakdown.
It co-stars Paquin as Lili, a quirky college siren who seduces
both her English professor (Jeff Daniels) and his son (Jesse
Eisenberg) without guilt or hesitation. "These are unusually
mature, complex characters," says Paquin, explaining the movie's
empathetic allure. "They do bad things for their own reasons,
but that doesn't make them morally bad. In fact your heart
breaks for these people."
Lili is pure Paquin. She's emblematic of a character type that
the actress has honed and played to unswerving perfection in
recent years. Sexually precocious, outwardly flirtatious, but
somehow held and grounded by a moribund undertow and a fey,
otherworldly sadness.
It's there in her best work, in Hurlyburly, in
Buffalo Soldiers, and even in her turn as Rogue,
the angst-ridden and literally "untouchable" outcast in
X-Men. So what does it say about her? "I like it
when people perceive different things going on under the
surface of a performance," she says cautiously.
The child of a Canadian father and a New Zealander mother,
Paquin grew up between continents. She attended the audition
in Wellington for The Piano on a whim -- she had just
moved school and was in need of a distraction. After her
surprise Oscar success she began to spend more time in North
America. Her parents split up during the filming of Carroll
Ballard's 1996 bird epic Fly Away Home, and Paquin
moved to LA with her mother.
The teen years were kind to her, as she avoided the dreaded
Adolescent Actor Meltdown. She credits her mother's loving
guidance for this, and her attendance at LA's strictly
academic Windward School. She was lucky, too. Her hormones
were kind to her and unlike, say, Shirley Temple or Haley
Joel Osment, her winning childhood cuteness wasn't steamrolled
into brutal anonymity by the physical vagaries of puberty.
"You mean, in other words, I didn't get ugly?" Er, yes.
"Well, thank you very much. I'm glad you think I didn't get
ugly. Although I think it's a little weird to talk about
my appearance. I look the way I look. But I suppose that,
yes, I got through puberty somewhat unscathed."
Unscathed or not, unconscious or not, Paquin parlayed a
promising teen career into fully fledged stardom. She is
currently regarded by a sizeable part of her fan-base,
especially the male X-Men devotees, as a sex
symbol. The online comic book discussion boards in
particular are alight with descriptive analyses of
Paquin's leather-clad rear on the movie posters.
She regards the X-Men phenomenon with something
approaching affectionate tolerance. She says that she gets
recognised a lot, especially around her new home in New
York's East Village.
At the moment she's battening down the hatches for the
summer onslaught by X-Men: The Last Stand. But
really, that whole blockbuster movie thing is not her.
"Besides X-Men, most of my movies have been smaller
films," she says.
Her next film is small, too. It's the new one from the
playwright/director Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me).
It's called Margaret and it's about a girl (Paquin)
who causes a bus crash.
"There's some pretty heavy stuff in there," she says,
gleefully. "But it's also an acknowledgement that you can
have light moments even when your life is falling to s***."
The Squid and the Whale is released on April 7
The Times, March 30, 2006
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